mercredi 11 juillet 2012

Were Video Games or Treatment His Death?

At the end of Dead Poet's Society one of the very charismatic teacher's students or even disciples has killed himself. The teacher is banned from school. Obviously the board has decided he was to blame. When he takes a farewell, his surviving students, most of whom were also his disciples or initiates, stand up on the benches, raise their arms and say out loudly: oh captain, may captain. They obviously did not blame him for their comrade's death. Was it the expectations he had raised about radically living one's own life after one's ideals and dreams - or was it the parental intervention stopping his "nonsense" with that actress that, in this fictitious example, killed the boy?

Amy Winehouse seems, according to one video at least, have been shot at while trying to get out of the centre where she was in desintoxication and under some therapy to get her sober. When she got out with her doctor's consent, she soon afterwards drank a quantity that killed her. Was she killed by her craving for alcohol? Or was the treatment offered her soon before and threatened her for long times afterwards causing a craving for forgetting her "real life"? Her example is unfortunately real.

Now, here* is a mother, whose son was "addicted" to EverQuest. She put him in group home for a long-term support program. He walked five miles home, he got in to start playing again, and that did not end his mother's efforts to help him. She did not give up. Her words at the beginning of a TFP article include:

"Despite our efforts to help him get his life back together, he committed suicide only a year and a half after being introduced to the game."

Despite her efforts - or because of them? Only a year and a half after being introduced to the game - or only an even shorter time after being diagnosed as having mental problems and being set on the long-term support program?

What I absolutely loathe about certain Trad Catholics and Conservative Catholics today, though I am Trad Catholic myself, is the total lack of questioning about this. Getting to more Modern confessional brethren will not always mean getting on to less bourgeoisely prejudiced ones.

Of course, suggesting to Mrs. Woolley that she rather than the game may have been what pushed her son to suicide would be rather brutal to her. Nevertheless, being polite to her cannot trump saving, if possible the next gamer from suicide - or saving society from pushing him to it. If Shawn Woolley killed himself because of his gaming, forbidding the game may be a priority. But if Shawn Woolley killed himself because of the treatment, stopping that kind of locking up may be a priority. As things are, society at large is divided on the question, and both the game and the locking up continues.

I am not into video games. That may come as a surprise to some. But I am not. I am on the internet to:

share my writings and compositions;

socialise with people who are interested in what I have to write or compose rather than with such who think I have a problem because I write.

The last point may need some elaboration. I am right wing insofar as I am for Franco and Salazar, but not for Hitler (though he was ally of Franco, and yes, I am in a limited way for Hitler when it comes to that support for Franco), for Dollfuß and Schuschnigg, but not for ... excuse me, the "but" was misplaced ... and therefore not for Tobias Portzschy, enemy of the gipsies, I am for Pétain but not for Laval, I am for Horthy but not for Szalaszy (was that the correct spelling?), I am for Mussolini say 1919 - 1938, and for Perón, but not for the Saló Republic - even though Mussolini was a figure head in it - or for the Militaries after Perón. On internet I can reach people who share those values. In Paris as in Beauvais, I am surrounded by people who seem to be engaged in some kind of group therapy, who seem to think I have some mental problem - related to lack of empathy. I think I have a social problem, and that they who think I have a mental problem are that social problem, and using internet is a way of getting around the social problem.**

Hence of course my apprehensions about people calling "over-use" of internet a mental problem.

Tolkien once asked, when it came to fairy stories as a kind of "escapism", what kind of people are most naturally prone to loathe escape. He asked that as a rhetorical question and gave the obvious answer (when it was not supplied by the one he was talking to, who I suppose was C S Lewis): "jailors".

Now, though I am not on video games, I did look EverQuest up. Violent adventures? Sure. First thing you get to when you look up their site is an Amazon clad (somewhat lightly) in blue and brandishiing a spear. Oh wait ...

Shawn never got a girlfriend? Shawn left his brother's wedding to play EverQuest?

Well, I left a wedding once during my teens and was willing to cry oceans of tears, and for a brief moment I was considering suicide. Who saved me (and I am alive years and years after that)? A shrink? Some therapy? No. C. S. Lewis. How? By writing about Hell. People do get damned, and suicide is one of the ways. And damnation is a damned sight more hopeless than whatever I was going through. That saved me.

So who am I to suppose I know better than the mother? I had a better mother who would not have handed me over to a group home. She has sacrificed a lot to not betray me to mental specialists.

And who am I to suppose I know better than the experts who run that group home? A specialist? No: but someone innocent of running group homes. Expert comes from experience. And experience is the cause of knowledge. But when it comes to acting out one's own life or interacting with other people, experience of acting well is cause of knowledge and experience of acting ill is cause of ignorance.

I think that kind of specialists are ignorant, I think they get ignorant by acting ill, I think that they like players of EverQuest get a lot of bonusses and competences that are not real, but unlike the players they are paid for abusing them in real life contexts where they are disastrous. And, not knowing more about the case than what TFP's interview with Mrs. Woolley tells me and my thoughts about other cases tells me about how to judge that, I think their sham competences rather than his own killed Shawn Woolley.

I have said it before: certain religions - Jewish has been noted in an essay about Hitler as a painter, Moslem has been noted in an essay about a recent suicide in a Muslim family - do not have the text of St Paul "ye fathers, .........". But some Catholics are not properly using the text either. Nor are they properly using the text "it is not good for man to be alone" in the context of creating woman.

Of course, that "many fathers leave their families to spend more time gaming" is bad. "They don't care about their children, because they feel all they can do is play." Is only time misspent previous to becoming a father to blame? Or are prejudices against gamers? Or generally feminist prejudices against bad husbands and fathers? Some women are easily hysteric about any drop of alcohol or any slight binge being a signal of alcoholism and of a man uncapable to be a husband and father. Some feminists, and at least when it comes to alcohol, some Muslims too, are very ready to spread that individual hysteria into a mass hysteria. Feminists are sometimes into getting ordinary power away from men by declaring them incompetent. Muslmis are sometimes into getting ordinary power away from Christian men by declaring them incompetent. And if they cannot do so with each and every Christian who is living a good life, they can do so with those who are not yet successful and who in their opinion is living a bad life.***

**I also think that they who think fascist sympathisers generally have a problem of empathy have a problem of empathy with fascists. They see so and so killed off workers "fighting for justice" (and killing for it too), do not consider that the justice the workers fought for may have been unjust, do not consider that fascists after shooting down some workers do something for other workers on the side of justice - and that the fascist idea of justice may have been more correct and also have been supported by more workers and farmers than the socialist workers they fought down. They measure with two standards. A Communist may have a grossly class egoistic ideal of justice, clearly related more to envy than to hope and kill innocent people while fighting for it. He is still fighting for justice. A Fascist may then have a more correct and equitable ideal of justice, giving hope to the poor to get individually richer (not supporting very speculative economics or the tendency of some patrons to pay badly but supporting small business and forcing big business to pay correctly), they might also kill Communists and those found fighting with them in order to impose their ideal of justice. But who is the baddy to these pacific Communist sympathisers over here? But anyway, they seem to think I have a mental problem for using the internet as well as they seem to think I have a mental problem about empathy for supporting certain kinds of fascism.

***I tend to get some apprehensions when I see blogs getting some of them more visits from Russia than from France - although France is where I live and blog and Russian is not my language. Of course, that can be staunch anti-Communists who think I write well, but it can also be Communists or ex-Communists who are arranging things about my surroundings here. There are after all international contacts. And some of my blogs I wonder why Tunisia and Saudi-Arabia are there. To see if I wrote something against Mohamet there too? Well, on some blogs I did. But I am not getting comments from Saudi-Arabia or Israel or Russia on why I am wrong, I am getting time after time some ennuie about using the internet or about my life in general, often enough after I wrote something critical about Islam, though that may be coincidence, though I don't happen to, think so.